There was a popular post today linked from Hacker News on the benefits of hiring a freelance editor. Looking into it, I think that what's described is really "Developmental editing" and "structural" editing as described here.

Maybe there's no replacement for a professional editor. But for a community like this with (I think) such a high ratio of contributors, I wondered if it might be valuable to try to arrange a kind of "buddy system" where we give feedback to each other to improve our writing.

For now, please don't worry about how that might work. At the moment I'd just like to gauge if there is enough interest that this is something that might be worth trying to organize.

Would you be interested in participating in this? If so, could you leave a short comment with answers to two questions?

Question 1: Would you participate in this ?

• Answer A: No
• Answer B: I'd volunteer to edit but wouldn't submit.
• Answer C: I'd edit and submit.

Question 2: How good do you think you would be at editing? Take the average front-page post at Lesswrong. If you took 30 minutes to give comments, and the author used your feedback, how much better would that post get? Measure quality via upvotes if you want.

• Answer A: Less than 1.5x
• Answer B: 1.5x-2x
• Answer C: 2x-4x
• Answer D: 4x or more

(Apologies if "real" polls are possible / better. The documentation for those seems to be really out of date.)